Feeling compelled to eat EVERYTHING on the plate

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twinsmummy20
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01 Apr 2011, 5:22 pm

This is an aspie thing? My husband is so bad at this it isnt even funny. He will finish ALL of our food. All 4 kids and mine (if he likes it). He cant waste food. He says he cant waste the money. If we go to a buffet, he eats forever. He is skinny too. But he eats so much it turns heads. He has to get his moneys worth. He gets buyers remorse easily if he doesnt feel full enough after.



Ashuahhe
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01 Apr 2011, 5:39 pm

I nearly finsh everything on the plate but I always leave a small piece of food on the plate. I can't eat it. Weird habit of mine :)



ruveyn
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01 Apr 2011, 7:45 pm

Roman wrote:
For some reason I feel bad not finishing what I have on a plate. I guess the logical reason is that I don't have much money and if I don't finish, I feel I wasted that money. But then again this is not entirely logical. I mean, if I am FORCING myself to finish the food, then I have "wasted" money regardless, since that money didn't bring me the "joy" of eating I payed for; and, on top of "wasting" it, I also undergone a torture of forcing myself to eat. Yet, I am compelled to do it.

One of the interesting examples of this happened today. At my Institute I had to give few coupons (that consted some money) to get lunch. Now, it is really hot here, so I don't want to eat, just drink. So I would normally have just not taken lunch and saved my cupons. But I saw a watermalon that was add on to lunch, and I decided to eat lunch just because of watermalon. Yet I didn't want to look weird in saying "I ONLY want addon and nothing else" (which could have saved me some cupons), so I took the entire thing and then forced myself to eat it as I kept looking forward to the watermalon at the end.

Can anyone else relate to this sort of thing? Do you think it is an aspie thing, or do NT do that as well?


It is not an Aspie or Autie thing.

My mother was an NT and she was always telling me that their are children starving to death in China (which was true at the time) so I should eat everything on my plate. A total non-sequitor.

ruveyn



anbuend
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03 Apr 2011, 8:40 am

"Nonautistic people do it too" doesn't mean something can't be caused by autism. A thing can have multiple causes. I have trouble not eating everything I'm given and it has to do with trouble initiating, stopping, switching, etc. So for me it is about being autistic.


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cosmiccat
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03 Apr 2011, 9:33 am

Quote:
Feeling compelled to eat everything on the plate


I used to have this problem. Now I just give anything I can't eat to the dog. Plate clean, dog happy.



KBerg
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03 Apr 2011, 11:20 pm

I blame parents. Not my parents specifically, but just parents in general. You'd always hear it from parents as a kid "Finish everything on your plate", then you'd either get a threat of withholding something you liked like dessert, or some tired old speech about starving kids in Africa. I never quite got why they didn't just give the food I didn't like to the starving kids in Africa if they really cared about the starving kids there.

Back when food was scarce it made sense, you ate what you could when you could because there might not be a chance to eat for a while again. But most of us live in a society of plenty when it comes to food, heck, overabundance even. There's absolutely no reason for us to finish everything on our plates if we're not hungry. It's not like the food's gonna get offended and go away forever.

The only reason I stuck to it was because it had been ingrained too well into me, then finally I realized y'know, I just don't like feeling like that... it sucks to feel like food is the enemy you must annihilate completely off your plate regardless of whether you want to or not. It seems to me to be a very unhealthy mindset to have towards food, and I finally figured that eh, this pressure to eat all you are served seemed like the kind of thing that could easily backfire into eating disorders when combined with something like my anxiety. Now I leave however much of whatever I don't want. I don't try to force myself to eat things when it's just making me feel like crap to do so and if that's a problem for starving children in Africa well... screw that, the gigantic portion size isn't my fault. They can go guilt trip whoever decided that the dietary need of a muscle mountain who works out 3 hours a day every day of the week and digs ditches for a living should be the baseline for portion sizes.



Pandora_Box
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04 Apr 2011, 4:54 am

KBerg wrote:
I blame parents. Not my parents specifically, but just parents in general. You'd always hear it from parents as a kid "Finish everything on your plate", then you'd either get a threat of withholding something you liked like dessert, or some tired old speech about starving kids in Africa. I never quite got why they didn't just give the food I didn't like to the starving kids in Africa if they really cared about the starving kids there.


I posted earlier I was taught with "you eat till your full"

I never understood the mentality of finishing everything on the plate from parents.



Roman
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30 Apr 2011, 12:33 am

I can relate to the replies that said they feel sorry for food. But I don't feel sorry in the way they do. I know food won't "feel bad" that I didn't eat it. What I DO feel sorry about is that if I eat a full vegetable or fruit (a full tomatoe, a full pepper, a full orange and so forth), and leave part of it, then the part that I left would be "dying in pain". For obvious reasons, I don't feel such sympathy for other kinds of food that is already dead. In that case, it is mostly about "having wasted money".